Well I am back.
I have actually been back for over a week now but have been somewhat surreptitious in announcing my presence. Just took a look at the blog and realized how long it has been since an update. Once I made the decision to leave Colombia, I pretty much put my head down and [...]
Good Days.
They sure have been. I arrived in Cali, Colombia three weeks ago. One of my major goals of the trip was to dance salsa in Cali, the world capital of salsa. I figured that if I arrived on Monday and started lessons immediately, I could be ready to hit the clubs by the weekend. [...]
I’ve decided that bike problems are good luck. I seem to meet the coolest people when resolving bike issues. I had pretty much decided to head for the coast and pound pavement to Ecuador. I need to meet my mom there on the 2nd and can’t be late. As I wrote previously, my subframe [...]
Please excuse me if I wax poetic. I have just had an absolutely transcendental
meal. If you ever go to Cusco, you absolutely must go to a restaurant called
Tabasco and try the Rocota Relleno. It may have had something to do with
reading the Bhagavad Gita as an appetizer, or perhaps the lack of spicy food
lately, [...]
Hello from Coroico, Bolivia
Coroico sits at the end of the "Road of Death", a dirt road that wists and turns through mountains northeast of La Paz. To be honest I was a little disappointed in the road. It was on my short list of things to see in South America because of posts like [...]
I love the word entonces. It has so much meaning and is used in so many ways. The simplest translation would be “therefore” or “so” as in “The road is closed, entonces…, we must turn around.” It seems to have more meaning than just “therefore”, however. Something along the lines of, “This is how [...]
Lately I have been feeling like I was born to speak Spanish yet ended up in the
wrong country and thus speaking the wrong language. Somehow my heart feels
bigger in Spanish. Luckily I only have to learn a new language to fix the
accident of my birth, unlike someone born the wrong gender who has a much
larger [...]
I am sitting in the central plaza of Antofagasta de La Sierra eating crackers and a tin of something called “Jamon del Diablo” or “Ham of the Devil” in english. It is actually quite good but I had to get over the fact that it looks and smells like Whisker’s Fancy Feast cat food. Antofagasta [...]
Read this while I was up in the Yukon. It is on my mind again tonight.
The Men That Don’t Fit In by Robert Service
There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field [...]
Hello from Bariloche. I am finally far enough North that I am starting to enjoy
riding again. Not that I wasn't enjoying my time in Patagonia but riding deep
gravel roads in driving wind and freezing rain through a largely featureless
landscape had turned my "riding enjoyment" into more of an abstract concept
than a reality. Daily riding was [...]